


No Second Troy

by squeeliferuiner



Category: Original Work
Genre: Feels, Gen, Prompt Fic, Vignette, this is a prompt fic but it is also real life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 01:32:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squeeliferuiner/pseuds/squeeliferuiner





	1. No Second Troy

_you don't know what it is about summer. every year in the bleakness of winter, you promise it will be better in the summer, a distant dream of sunlight and clear vision and a tempest that is gone soon enough, leaving your garden refreshed and the earth growing anew. summer is for the peace between the tantrums._

_it's never like you imagine it will be. the long months in between make you forget that the light is harsh and the brightness so sharp it could cut through the tie binding your soul to your body if you let it._

_you're travelling today, as if change of venue will help. flying makes you forget how big your country is, but this place, fifty miles from a coast you've never seen, a place where life slows to the point of stillness, it's your land but this is foreign, a strange country. you hate travel, you hate the sweaty hurry of airports and the fear that grips you to see the ground six miles below. you hate strange places and things that change._

_but this soft stillness makes you stop and breathe. again. this is it, you've waited your whole life for the day things stop to a standstill and this is it. you've never been so sure of anything._

_she greets you in a crowded room. she's never seen you before, not really, but she knows it's you; you've known each other for years, forever and a day. and she smiles, and it takes away what little breath the heat has left you. it's august. the land doesn't breathe and neither do the people, except to exchange easy hellos in passing._

_you drive almost silently in the darkness, the stillness. the power's gone out when you get home (home), but you don't mind, even as you unstick your thighs from the leather seat of the volvo, because you'll read poetry to each other in the dark by dying flashlight and marvel at the humidity, so dank you can see your breath on every exhale. and you think briefly, this isn't summer. it's just another word for the winter you know best._

_it's hot. so much heat everywhere. your skin feels like it's melting, the way your name melts on her tongue like butterscotch. you wonder no one else sees the heat between you, a visible thing in waves, taking on a life of its own now. you sleep as if fevered, restless and torn between waking life and the dream you're chasing._

_you don't know what to think when you wake in the morning. the world is sharp-outlined like a jagged cartoon, what you always expect from summer. but your mind is far from clear. the softness of the night before is gone, and in its place the awkwardness that heavy light can bring._

_in the car now, no words. unfamiliar trees pass you and you remember now that you hate travel, you hate the strangeness. sighing, you turn inward, staring instead into the unfamiliar controls of the stereo, the display that tells you how much further you can go on this tank, that the temperature outside is only a warmer version of this silent near-hell. some sound, anything. a little mahler, a lot of "do we **have** to listen to **that**?" and with a click, more silence. the wall is up again, yours and hers both and there's nothing you can say._

_you've done your errands. target is the same everywhere, even in this strange land where everything is slow motion but you. every gas station looks the same, every Blockbuster and McDonald's and US Bank, and then you can't help but laugh to yourself, and her voice when she asks is gentle, and soft, and a little sad. and you feel silly and childish when you explain that when you were younger, you thought it was "us bank," where two people, an us, would go to store everything that made them a them, an us, and not just two separate people, and she smiles now and says she understands and the heat is back and you fall silent. but it's not a war silence this time, it's like when you're stroking someone's skin and your breath catches and words fail because the moment is both too big and too small to contain them. it's that kind of silent and she won't meet your eye, and it's just as well, you think, because you might combust right here if she did._

_and days continue to pass and you continue to not notice, wrapped up in the slow steady cadence of her words and the way her skin moves over her muscles and the swing of her unnaturally blond hair across her jaw. in retrospect, you can't remember how you spent your days. but you know you were happy, flush with the promise of future tucked into this corner of present. and you don't know how the day of leaving arrives, how in every breath falling flat into the hot air you protest against the passage of time and make half-oaths about next week, next month, next year, when all you really want is for the clock not to flip to the next hour. your eyes sting as you walk away with the scent of her in your clothes and the softness, the slowness in your own speech. and now you remember that you hate the cold steel of airplanes and the frantic activity that would destroy your melancholy reverie. this was the dream of summer you always talked about in the other half of the year, and the fates are conspiring to steal it._

_it's only a few weeks later that she says the words that shatter you, that it's over. and the peace is replaced by violent dreams, of wars and walls you wish you'd managed to hold fast against her. this is why you hate summer, you tell yourself, and as the months pass again, all you can remember is sweet tea that turned to poison in your heart and a nightmare you should have seen coming._

_there's nothing here worth saving now, no broken pottery or greatness, just a small desperation that clings to day-to-day and winces in the bright heat, and wishes it were winter._


	2. The More Loving One

_The night you remember best is the one at the playground. You don’t know why you went and you don’t know what made you get out of the car, your hands sticky from overflowing milkshakes and the rest of you sticky from the relentlessness of North Carolina summer. The elementary school is dark and the fluorescents over the parking lot flicker. The swings move faintly in a breeze you can’t feel. The metal beneath the chipped paint gleams dully in the inconstant light. Gravel crunches beneath your feet as you wander aimlessly._

_She’s been talking about making a movie, about sad girls and the end of the world. She wants a playground, and you wonder briefly if this is why you’re here, an unconscious rehearsal of what she’s seeing in her head, what she wants on shaky handheld film. She doesn’t speak much, uncharacteristically; she’s lost in her thoughts and you’re lost in her._

_You remember looking up at the sky, back to the comfort of streetlights, back to the discomfort of her. The chain of the swing bites into your hips – it’s made for children, not for you. And like a child, your mouth is opening and words tumbling before you have a chance to stop them – “it’s going to be so hard to leave,” you say, and she doesn’t say anything at all and you can’t bring yourself to look at her._

_This is the night you remember best, the heat and awkwardness and awkward darkness. You know now what you didn’t want to see, that the bliss was singular. You try to tell yourself it doesn’t matter whether she meant every word the way you did. You try to convince yourself that every playground doesn’t remind you of her, that this sky is different, these lights are not broken. And it never works._


	3. A Year Goes By

_You watch the days approaching with trepidation creeping into your gut. You watch the clock tick onward and the count go up, one by one, and though your philosophy these last few months has been day to day, hour by hour, now you can’t help notice because the date looms high, like blinking neon on a long night drive home, advertising coffee and down-home-diner-cookin’ and comfort for your soul and next door the comforts for body as well, nice-but-naughty and playthings for adults. Bright lights and closed spaces that stink of a half-century of stale cigarettes and trucker sweat and tiredness and a loneliness the desperate billboard can’t quite disguise. That’s what it feels like, a date plastered across your forehead that surely everyone else must be able to see, though you know they can’t. you just wish they could._   
  
_Sound-flashes of pop songs fill your head with all the trite lyrics you once thought meant everything. But now you know nothing means everything. Though as soon as you think that, you’re sure whether it’s that nothing means everything or everything means nothing. It doesn’t matter, you think, as you watch the second hand twirl around, again and again, indecisive about whether you want to change your calendar page to September. You think if you can just forget what month it is, you’ll be on to October and your dreaded anniversary will be over. You hate that you can’t forget dates, that you still remember that in 1999, December 4th was a Saturday, that you remember your seventeenth birthday was on a Friday. You think if you just pass them by, they won’t matter anymore._   
  
_In the meantime, you’re letting yourself drift in nostalgia, like that time at the amusement park where you climbed the stairs to the roller coaster but then rather than ride it, threw popcorn over the railing down at unsuspecting tourists, and then ran around soaking your legs in the sprinklers they had running against the heat, and you stood on the line between North and South Carolina and declared that you had now been in two places at once. And you ignored the phone ringing over and over because it meant you’d have to leave and go home, and you were having too much fun watching the night fall over the ferris wheel and riding all of the loop-the-loop scream machines because it gave you an excuse to hold her hand._   
  
_You’re trying to think about that, about the four-hour phone calls and the plans to run away to Vegas and get hitched and the way she said your name in southern drawl, because you know you’re happy now and she’ll always be part of what you are. When you were eight, you got a little machine for your birthday that would take rough stones and polish them into a beautiful tiger’s eye or amethyst that you could put on a chain to wear. The smell of the polishing grit was bad and the racket of the stones tumbling night after night was worse; weeks later, you were sure you could still hear them clanking between your ears. But it worked. And you’re sure now that this will too; that you’ll be left with the softness and none of the edges._   
  
_You’ve got a new girlfriend, and she doesn’t need an excuse to hold your hand. And you don’t want to have an excuse for holding back. You don’t talk about what day it is. She knows you’re thinking about it; she knows maybe you always will be. She knows that in the end, summer and winter are synonymous; she knows that no two people smile the same way and that you won’t ever forget. But she also knows that you take honey in your tea instead of sugar and that you like your bacon burned, but not your toast. She knows that you always put on your left shoe before your right shoe and she knows that your favorite toothpaste is Crest Regular, hold the mint._   
  
_And now when you sit here in your living room watching the afternoon light filter in through the cheap beige blinds, you think that you’ve been living a filtered life for this past year. You can hear the clock today, creeping you closer and closer, but you can also see the pale blue sky and buttery light of autumn and the more you think about it, you’re really quite tired of beige and fear. It’s time to face the sun_


	4. We're In This Together Now

_The shrill ringing of the phone next to your ear snaps you out of sleep. You groan and roll over, fighting answering it, knowing who it is and what it means – but you know if you don’t, you’ll regret it later, and so you do, and you rub sleep out of your eyes and mumble something appropriate in your morning voice and struggle to understand Received Pronunciation English at 10 am when you’ve been dreaming in Southern._   
  
_It’s raining, water slapping softly against your windows behind the heavy red curtains. The air in your room is cold, thick, and wet, and you pull the down comforter up over your head as you exchange your greetings. It’s raining less than yesterday, though, and the roads are open, and though your head aches dully and you’re still not sure you want to drive for three hours, you know you’ll go, and you finish making your plans and click the phone and close your eyes and sigh._   
  
_Today you’re nervous. You’re meeting someone new: someone you’ve known for years but have never met in person. You can’t help but be reminded of the parallels – after all, that’s how it was with her – but this time it isn’t about romance or love, but the soft comfort of friendship like warm flannel and bunny slippers._   
  
_You sing to yourself on the drive down, of peace and anger, love and sadness, and by the time you reach the Windy City your hands are stiff with cold and tension and your mind is running amuck but you’re ready, and each complication – the trains don’t run on Sunday, the clouds are still oozing rain – just serves to make you more determined._   
  
_When you see her, the first thing that goes through your mind is that she’s taller than you expected, and each time you look at her from then on out you keep thinking that she’s taller, she’s more colorful, her accent is more pronounced, she’s just more. Because you know right then, in that first five minutes, when all the nervousness flies out of your head because you think you’ve known her forever, you know right then that you could fall in love with her completely._   
  
_You don’t do much. There are a million things to do and see in Chicago, but you don’t do any of them, because what you notice is the small things: where movies have been filmed, the way the tall towers disappear into the looming fog, the bus crazies, and the way the shadows under the construction scaffolds seem to breathe in the humidity and onrush of people at each corner street crossing. You wander down Navy Pier and you think about the adventures you would have on the wooden-masted sailing ships, travelling around the world living on a yacht when you're rich and famous. And you splurge on straw wish bracelets with red and black and clear and gold beads, that mean passion and luck and peace and friendship, and you spend hours upon hours just talking and laughing._   
  
_None of it is exciting, Starbucks and Denny’s and all this typical American stuff that she doesn’t know because she’s British, and you feel like you should be showing her something more interesting, but this is what she wants to see. Where you eat and what you do and how you live. She’s fascinated by the things you don’t stop to think about, like pancakes as big as your head and the fact that you can sit on a bus for fifty hours and still only be halfway across the country, and how they dye the Chicago River green on St. Patrick’s Day and Sprecher’s Grape Soda and French fries with everything. And later if asked to describe your day, you can’t come up with anything specific, just that it was the most wonderful day of your life._   
  
_When you leave, when you struggle to pull apart from her because you have three long hours’ drive that take you farther and farther away each mile, you keep thinking that you wish you could fall in love with her. You wish you could, but England is too far away, and she’s so young, and you’re so broken, and though she’s finally helped you escape that filter and live in Technicolor, you just don’t know if it’s enough to justify a day or two every two or three years._   
  
_So you wrap her up in your heart in soft pink tissue paper, and you let this day be the thing you remember when everything else threatens to take over._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Real-life events may have been very slightly dramatized for the making of a better story. 
> 
> But not much.


End file.
